But I wanted to know more, including whether Lady Grantham’s mother, too, was Jewish (and therefore whether her three daughters with Lord Grantham—and any children they might have—are). I wasn’t going to let her being a fictional character stop me. I emailed Jonathan Sarna, a Brandeis professor, author of Nextbook Press’s forthcoming When General Grant Expelled The Jews, and co-author of a 1989 book called, yes, The Jews of Cincinnati.

First, Sarna explained, even if Isidore Levinson isn’t real, he’s based on reality. Start from the premise that Lady Grantham is probably in her 40s when the show’s first episode begins in April 1912 (you know the exact date because a certain event has occurred that morning). Meaning she was born in Cincinnati in the late 19th century. According to Sarna, one study pegged to 1860 reports, “The manufacture, distribution, and sales of men’s ready-made clothing and other apparel supplied at least a portion of the livelihood for well over one-half of Cincinnati’s Jews.” Sarna added, “Other Jews were in dry goods. Jews benefited enormously from the Civil War and by the 1870s numbers of them were wealthy. One need only look at Plum Street Temple (the former synagogue of Isaac M. Wise, built in 1867 and now a National Historic Shrine) to get a sense of the community’s wealth.”

So a wealthy Cincinnati-based Jewish dry-goods merchant makes sense. Would a theoretical Levinson have married a Jew? “Most of the Jews who were in their prime in the 1870s had arrived in Cincinnati as immigrants in the 1840s and ’50s,” Sarna continues. “Those Jews had overwhelmingly married Jews. Some of their children, of course, did not. The daughter of Charles Fleischmann (of dried yeast fame) married Christian R. Holmes and one of Rabbi Wise’s daughters also eloped with a non-Jew (but raised Jewish descendants). However, as late as World War I, the intermarriage rate was a paltry 4.5 percent.”

In conclusion? “‘Isidore Levinson’ would have been right at home in Cincinnati in the 1870s, his wife would have been Jewish, and perhaps his daughter was among those who married out—into faded English royalty.” Oh, hooray!

Earlier: The Jewish Character in ‘Downton Abbey’

Where once everyone in town had long believed in a rough estimate of 25,000 Portland Jews, suddenly a new, far more accurate count was on people’s lips: 47,500. “The Federation did this census,” said University of Oregon historian William Toll, referring to the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland—which, to help serve this proudly weird, exceedingly non-religious city, decided two years ago that it needed a better count of its target audience. This survey was the first serious census of Portland Jews in decades, Toll said, and when the final results came out in the spring, “lo and behold, there were twice as many Jews in Portland as they thought were there.”

“People were stunned,” Marc Blattner, president and CEO of the Federation, told me. And a mystery was born. Toll mimicked the reaction of Federation leaders: “Who are they? Where did they come from?” The answer? “They don’t know.”

So, one day late in the summer, I pumped up the tires on my bike, told my Seattle friends I was off to look for the Lost Tribe of Portland, and boarded an Amtrak train heading south.

“Bridgetown” is one of Portland’s best-earned nicknames—there are eight major bridges in the central business district—but another way of looking at things is that Portland is a city sliced in half by a river. This particular geography is key to understanding the lay of the Jewish land in Portland. The cold, snow-melt-fed waters of the Willamette River run through the middle of the city, flowing northward toward the bigger Columbia River and then out into the Pacific. It’s picturesque, but it cuts Bridgetown into its distinct western and eastern sides, and it divides the Jewish community, too.

The Jewish establishment in Portland—the oldest synagogues, the Federation headquarters, the Federation’s best donors, the more buttoned-up crowd—can be found in west Portland. The “Lost Tribe”—a mass of younger, less affluent, largely unaffiliated Jews who turned up in the Federation’s new census—can be found mainly in the city’s eastern half. Hence, one major conclusion of the Federation’s census: Jewish leaders in the city need to begin more outreach, “especially on the east side,” the survey states, to engage this previously unknown, presently underserved mass of Jews.

“We know that they’re people,” the Federation’s Blattner told me. “They’re regular people. But what they want and what they’re interested in is the question.” Another study, this one focused exclusively on the east side, is in the works. In the meantime, the Federation is putting about $300,000—or 10 percent of its annual campaign—behind events like the one I’d come to Portland to see.

***

It was a Friday evening in late July. As the sun was going down I left the Amtrak station in west Portland and headed east, pedaling up a ramp onto the red steel-trussed Broadway Bridge, then over the Willamette River, and finally up a steep hill to Overlook Park. Under a giant ash tree: a pile of bikes laid down by locals who, like me, had ridden rather than driven to “Shabbat in the Park.”

About 150 Portland Jews were there, picnicking in golden light filtering down through the leaves of the big tree and creating a beautiful, classically Northwest scene—one that also made for easy allusions to the Tree of Life and the Garden of Eden. The rabbis presiding over the event did not miss the opportunity and made those exact allusions as participants flipped through a three-page, stapled prayer service that included English translations (and transliterations) for the Hebrew prayers.

“You may not know this, but it’s the Jews who invented TGIF,” Rabbi Ariel Stone told the crowd. She leads Shir Tikvah, the cosponsoring synagogue for the event. Founded in 2002, it’s the only synagogue on the east side of Portland and currently shares sanctuary space with a United Church of Christ. “We daven in our Birkenstocks and our jeans,” Stone told me, speaking of her congregation. “We do yoga. We’re vegans.”

Stone told the crowd that night: “It’s not important where you belong. All that’s important is that you belong. No one ever has to be alone in this world.” Amid drum- and guitar-playing, there was talk of mindfulness and intentionality and suggestions that Judaism could be freer of guilt and neurosis. Rabbi Brad Greenstein, of the west side’s Congregation Neveh Shalom, which helped organize the event and is the oldest Conservative synagogue on the west coast, explained the purpose of the evening as “outreach toward unaffiliated Jews.” He spoke to the crowd about abandoning iPods and other technology, at least for a moment, and “tuning our souls to the frequency of meaning.”

Many American Jews found themselves between a rock and several hard places: In the north, they were Unionist; the Torah arguably sanctions slavery; southern Jews such as future Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin were staunch members of the slave-holding elite; and, to top it all off, northern abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison were mainly evangelical Christians who regularly trafficked in standard anti-Semitism. Take, for example, one anti-slavery Ohio senator, who called Benjamin “an Israelite with Egyptian principles.”

And yet, didn’t the Jew-baiting Ohioan also have a point?

Among Jews then, the most influential voice was Rabbi Morris J. Raphall of lower Manhattan’s B’nai Jeshurun (the ancestor of the modern-day non-denominational synagogue on the Upper West Side), who argued that the story of Noah’s son Ham provided license for slavery, but that Southern slavery—which treated the slaves not as humans but as things, he argued—was, shall we say, unkosher. Jewish scholar Michael Heilprin countered by arguing that the crucial word in Ham’s story is properly translated not as “slave” but as “servant,” which would make all slavery, Southern or otherwise, verboten.

The true hero, however, is the Bavaria-born Reform Baltimore rabbi David Einhorn. “Jews for thousands of years consciously or unconsciously were fighting for freedom of conscience,” he wrote. Raphall’s arguments were “deplorable;” slavery was “immoral and must be abolished.”

Incidentally, Jonathan Sarna is at work on a Nextbook Press book about then-General Ulysses S. Grant’s infamous expulsion of the Jews from the war zone.

The Rabbi and the Rebellion [NYT]
Related: When Grant Expelled the Jews [Nextbook Press]

The short stories in Erika Dreifus’ debut collection, Quiet Americans (Last Light, January), focus on families and individuals working through traumas of the Holocaust, decades afterward. Unlike many writers, Dreifus recognizes the bitter irony that, if successful, she will profit by making art out of the experiences of the victims, survivors, and perpetrators of Nazi genocide: She will donate some proceeds from the book to a charity that supports indigent Holocaust survivors. Dreifus also admirably engages in deeper exploration of Jewish identity than some chroniclers of Jewish victimization, for whom persecution is all that makes Jews interesting. As she notes in one of the recent posts from her “blog tour”—Dreifus, who holds a Harvard doctorate in modern history, is also an indefatigable social networker and e-newsletterer—her fiction fits the model of Jewish identity proposed by the veteran educator Avraham Infeld, in that the stories invoke, at least briefly, all five of the components of Infeld’s “five-legged table” concept of Jewish identity: memory, family, covenant, Hebrew, and Israel.

***

Core to Infeld’s pedagogic shtick is that a table doesn’t need five legs to stand, just three; and “if we all choose at least three, we won’t be uniform, but we’ll always have something that we share.” It’s a sweet idea, but finding values and principles that all Jews share is, cute metaphors aside, a challenge. The 2011 issue of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, edited by Eli Lederhendler and titled Ethnicity and Beyond: Theories and Dilemmas of Jewish Group Demarcation (Oxford, February), tackles this problem, especially as it relates to the slippery concept of “ethnicity.” The volume’s contributors—leading analysts of American Jewry like Jonathan Sarna, Riv-Ellen Prell, Sarah Bunin Benor, and Steven M. Cohen, as well as a few scholars with international perspectives—debate the usefulness of thinking about Jews as ethnics.

***

Alan Montefiore approaches the vexed questions of Jewish identity with the explanatory tools of his academic discipline, analytic philosophy, in A Philosophical Retrospective: Facts, Values, and Jewish Identity (Columbia, February). Do the “facts” of our backgrounds determine our “values”? Should they? Montefiore—whose descent from one of England’s great Jewish dynasties one would expect to wield some sort of influence upon the course of his life—argues that those who differ on these questions do so because of their fundamentally dissimilar ideas about the relationship of the individual to the social collective.

***

British intellectuals like Montefiore have been fretting and fussing about the complexities of modern Jewish identity, especially as they play out among the poor Jews on the continent, since at least the mid-19th century. That’s where Sam Johnson’s study, Pogroms, Peasants, Jews: Britain and Eastern Europe’s ‘Jewish Question’, 1867-1925 (Palgrave, January) begins. Johnson chronicles the responses of Brits to all sorts of Jewish tsuris, from the Romanian anti-Semitism of the 1860s and 1870s to the infamous Kishinev pogrom of 1903, also offering a wide-ranging survey of “Ostjuden in the British mindset.”

***

For the Piaseczna Rebbe, Kalonymus Lamish Shapira, Jewish identity per se wasn’t all that complex; his concern was the growing unwillingness of young Jews to fulfill their responsibilities to their people and to their God. In The Students’ Obligation and Three Discourses (Feldheim, January), newly published in a handsome facing-page translation, the Rebbe—who maintained his faith even while confined to the Warsaw Ghetto, and who was murdered in a Nazi work camp in November 1943—outlines his educational philosophy (“The most important thing is to teach them that they themselves are their own educators”) and calls out directly to lazy, egotistic, and falsely humble teenagers: “Jewish youth! … Do you really want to cause Klal Yisrael to continue to waste away in galus … without leaders?”

***

More and more, scholars of Christian history and culture are acknowledging that they cannot make much sense of their subject matter without close attention to Jews and Jewishness. For example, the 13 essays gathered in Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties From the Catacombs to Colonialism (Penn, February), edited by David Nirenberg and Herbert Kessler, all concur that in various “Christian cultures” throughout the centuries “art defined and legitimated itself by rearticulating and representing its relationship to ‘Judaism’ ”; examples range from 4th-century reliefs to Delacroix’s A Jewish Wedding in Morocco (1839). And even a Catholic theologian like Brant Pitre admits the utility of consulting Jewish sources. Though he notes in his Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets to the Last Supper (Doubleday, February) that he treats “the four Gospels as reliable historical witnesses to the words and deeds of Jesus … following the traditional Christian view of their historical reliability, as well as the official Catholic teaching promulgated in 1965 at the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council,” he also insists that if they hope “to understand what Jesus was doing and saying in his original context,” Christians must carefully study the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus’ writings, and particularly the Talmud and Midrash.

***

Henry Miller couldn’t have been thinking of chess prodigy Bobby Fischer when he asked, in Tropic of Cancer, “Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?” But Miller nailed Fischer, nonetheless: After his dazzling victory over Boris Spassky in 1972, Fischer, whose mother was Jewish (and who, as Gary Kasparov points out, recent rumors suggest might have had a Jewish father, too), retreated from the spotlight and became fascinated by anti-Semitic tracts including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Ben Klassen’s Nature’s Eternal Religion. His animus bloomed as the years passed: He wrote in 1999, “Unfortunately we’re not strong enough just to wipe out all the Jews at this time. So what I believe we should do is engage in vigilante random killing of Jews. … They deserve to have their heads cracked open.” In telling the twisted prodigy’s whole story in Endgame: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Bobby Fischer (Crown, February), Frank Brady sketches various attempts to explain Fischer’s turn to bigotry, even quoting David Mamet’s Nextbook Press volume on self-hatred. If nothing else, Fischer is one more reminder for us of the wide gap between brilliance and goodness.

This essay has motivated nearly all of my work, though perhaps nothing as much as my most recent project: Sukkah City, an international design competition organized with my friend Joshua Foer, based on the primitive, biblical construction of the sukkah. If the members of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association could turn the minor holiday of Hanukkah into a major annual festival, maybe could we reverse the process and restore Sukkot—a ritual once central to the Jewish year—to its rightful pedestal.

***

The Sukkah City crew entered in Union Square as interlopers: a phalanx of nervous architects and engineers accompanying a dozen hulking sukkahs, partially built and arriving on a procession of flatbed trucks. At dusk on the evening of September 18, our convoy had left from a holding site in Brooklyn. We didn’t reach Union Square until downtown was dark.

Our mood had been so calm and optimistic back in the workshop. Over the previous 10 days, teams of architects had arrived from France, England, Japan, and Germany. Not just Jews, but Catholics, Muslims, and Bahai, all unexpectedly joined by a newly discovered yet nonetheless passionate fascination with sukkahs. They had dropped everything to re-locate to New York City, source materials, and coax carpenters, fabricators, and engineers to lend a shoulder and make their visions real.

Three days before the competition, the teams’ arsenals of raw materials—still at the studio in Gowanus—sufficiently resembled sukkahs for us to throw a preview party in Brooklyn. But just as we arrived at the space, a storm of biblical proportions tore through Queens and Brooklyn, rattling down the street in front of our studio, leaving it littered with shattered tree branches. I watched with fear, aware that an encore of this weather in Union Square would immediately tear apart our sukkahs. But many of the architects were delighted, seeing it as some kind of a heavenly sign that everything would be fine, since, after all, God had made schach—the foliage that traditionally covers a sukkah roof—rain from the sky.

Before we knew it, we were on that ride, and then standing at the precipice of our project: Union Square, on a Saturday night.

The plaza crackled with merriment as thousands of New Yorkers and tourists tangled around buskers, jugglers, chess hustlers, and an entire 10-piece New Orleans brass band. A dozen skaters and stunt bikers propelled themselves off the steps below the plaza, careening at speed, buzzing passers-by. The folly of our mission became instantly clear: How were we going to build these sukkahs amidst this havoc, under cover of darkness, in front of a Whole Foods and a Filene’s Basement?

Two enormous banks of floodlights were laboriously wheeled into position. With a flick of a switch, their beam turned night into day (and caused half of the plaza dwellers to scatter instantly away in search of darkness). The sukkah builders seized their chance, scurrying to their assigned positions with drills and hammers at the ready. The build-out began.

Union Square was transformed into a construction site. The sounds of buzzsaws, shredders, and power drills were pierced only by the scream of a forklift backing up—none of which, of course, kept inquisitive New Yorkers from risking life and limb to figure out what was going on, pressing eagerly past the danger signs for a peek. At 4 a.m., we realized just how fast and far word had spread: A gaggle of frat boys stormed the plaza, breathless: Where, they demanded, were the “hookers” they had heard rumor of in Union Square?

By 6:30 a.m., the last of the sukkahs was complete. The architects dragged themselves off to bed. The plaza was eerily silent. I was left almost alone at dawn in Union Square, with only the fantastical structures for company.

The visitors came in droves. First the dog-walkers, followed by young stroller-pushing dads foraging for early cups of coffee. Teams of architectural photographers silently clustered around the exhibits, clicking away, eager to finish their work before the crowds emerged. And then, at 10 a.m., as if from central casting, a crushing mass of New Yorkers descended on the plaza.

A basketball team from the Bronx clustered in a pack. Sailors paraded past. Girlfriends posed daintily in front of a sukkah as their boyfriends snapped away with their cellphones. Elderly couples strolled hand in hand. Entire Orthodox congregations snaked behind as their rabbinical leaders examined the halakhic qualities of each building. By lunchtime, I had heard more than one group of homeless men debating the merits and demerits of the different approaches to schach.

The waves of viewers were relentless, and each brought with it its own set of characters. When night returned, the crowd became younger—the party kids, drinkers, BMX-ers and skaters. At 4 a.m., the square was packed with a mellow crowd for whom the sukkahs were akin to some epic HBO original programming they remained glued to for an hour at a time. By Day 2, our architects had been fairly battered by crowds’ eager, repetitive questions:

• How many shims were in the Shim City sukkah? (Over 10,000.)
• Was Single Thread really made out of single thread of wire? (Yes.)
• Was Log really kosher (Yes, according to our Orthodox engineer)

Every time I saw a tourist snap a photo, each moment our Twitter count trended upward or people asked us where the nearest hardware store was located so they could go and build a sukkah of their very own, I thought of Sarna’s essay and the brilliance of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association who had the smarts to transform a festival with a succinct performance on a single evening.

At 5 p.m. on September 20, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg arrived to present the People’s Choice award to the winner. As he opened the envelope and announced “Fractured Bubble,” a scream emerged from one corner of the plaza. The mothers of the two winning architects had been unable to contain themselves, and—as we learned that moment—there are few sounds more joyous than that of a proud Jewish mother and a proud Bahai mother celebrating in unison.

Roger Bennett is the co-founder of Reboot, Sukkah City, and the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation.

Those questions may appear nebulous, simultaneously too elusive and too deep for anyone to attempt to answer seriously. But look at the landscape of Jewish life and two broad currents suggest themselves, two divergent agendas that address much more than the question of conversion alone. On the one hand, those who imagine Judaism as an exclusive enterprise advocate that the religion and its followers alike should move in ever-diminishing circles, orbiting around a small nucleus of rabbis entrusted with parsing the halachic laws. This approach is not without its merits; trying to make sense of an ancient faith in a modern world is a mighty and baffling task, and the drive inward, toward purity and certainty, is both instinctive and immensely reassuring.

But those of us who believe that Judaism’s survival also depends on its ability to adapt to the spiritual and practical challenges imposed by modernity must reject the urge to narrow our common horizons. Instead, we must examine our boundaries and beliefs and work to welcome new people, new traditions, and new ideas into the fold. To some, such talk may have the airy, hollow ring of universalist New Age spirituality. But that is not the case—as we think will be clear from the collection of essays by rabbis and writers, scholars and cooks, comedians and community leaders in Tablet Magazine’s High Holiday package. Some of these articles and essays are personal, others historical. In them, we hope each reader will find his or her own path toward answering Judaism’s essential questions, impossible and beautiful and all-encompassing—the only questions worth asking.

Judaism’s greatest sages have always plunged into the depths of doubt in an effort to find morsels of wisdom. This holiday season, two of our contributors evoke the memories of such men: Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, in an essay coming tomorrow, writes about Hillel the Elder, who defined Jewish peoplehood in radically inclusive terms, and Rodger Kamenetz recalls his journey to commune with the spirit of the late Nachman of Bratslav, a 19th-century rabbi who made his home among the non-believers in the hope of showing them the merits of faith.

These rabbis—and other, less illustrious but no less righteous men and women throughout history—embody Judaism’s finest qualities. As their respective communities sought solace and comfort in closed doors and closed minds, they ventured out and struggled to expand the boundaries of peoplehood, occasionally disregarding the letter in service of the spirit. It is doubt, they realized, that makes the believer’s faith more meaningful, and it is compassion for others that makes one’s understanding of oneself more complete. Armed with these convictions, they engaged with the world; more than any enforcer of strict rules or arbiter of stern edicts, they taught us what it means to be Jewish.

As we approach Rosh Hashanah, we would do well to abandon the pointless fights that have embroiled so many of us for so long, and to insist instead that there are other, better, more urgent questions for us to be asking. We must ask how we can invite as many newcomers to partake in Judaism—as those interviewed by Joan Nathan for her food column have done—without eroding the religion’s core tenets. We must ask what forms of innovative communal structures we might erect to serve the needs of those whom consequences placed just outside the reach of tradition’s grasp, as Rabbi Andy Bachman does in a Vox Tablet podcast about, of all things, burial customs.

Most important, we must ask which of our beliefs guide us forward and which are merely vantage points to the past. And we must do so without turning denominational divides into weapons of divisiveness. In the course of recent American Jewish history, Reform and Conservative rabbis have sometimes preferred strict interpretations of Jewish law, while Orthodox rabbis have allowed room for ambiguity. Indeed, it is the Orthodox rabbi Avi Shafran who here reminds us of the inherent dangers of generalizations and collective judgments, a shortcoming from which Jews of all stripes are not immune.

Unlike Passover or Purim, Rosh Hashanah has no haggadah or megillah, no seminal text that invites us to ponder the meaning of the holiday. It is up to us to stir up debate, to ask what traditions still matter and what should be reconsidered. We hope you’ll find kindling for conversation in the articles and other content we’re publishing this week. And even if not, at the very least try the pomegranate martini.

Shanah tova, from everyone at Tablet Magazine.

“When you ask people what’s their favorite holiday, I’ve heard people say Passover, Hanukkah, Sukkot, Purim,” says Jonathan Sarna, who teaches American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “I think it’s harder for people to find an emotional attachment to Shavuot than to almost any other Jewish holiday.” According to Sarna and other historians, Shavuot’s trouble catching on is nothing new—it goes back, they say, to the fall of the Second Temple in the year 70 C.E.

In its earliest incarnation, Shavuot marked a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the sacrifice of the harvest’s first fruits and is one of a historical trio of harvest celebrations, along with Sukkot and Passover, known as the shalosh regalim. According to Paul Steinberg, a rabbi at the Conservative synagogue Valley Beth Shalom in Los Angeles and the author of a series of books on the Jewish holidays, rabbis in the Talmudic period needed to reinvent Shavuot after the Jews left Israel for the Diaspora and no longer traveled to Jerusalem with harvest offerings. So, through what Steinberg calls the use of “complicated mathematical formulas” that were debated for centuries, the sages associated Shavuot with the giving of the Torah. But that interpretive shift, says Steinberg, has not “captured the imagination of Jews in America or anywhere else.” (According to Reform rabbi Andy Bachman, who leads Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim, some early Zionist settlers went so far as to explicitly reject the rabbinic interpretation of the holiday in favor of the agricultural one and celebrated Shavuot by dancing in the fields and riding on tractors.)

In the United States, Shavuot has met with particularly bad fortune. “They used to say that Jewish holidays needed mazel,” or luck, Sarna says. Hanukkah and Passover—located next to major Christian holidays that Jews want an alternative to—have mazel. Shavuot, marooned in the long stretch between Passover and the High Holidays, has the opposite. “Passover is the last Jewish gesture of the year before you disappear into summer camp, Memorial Day, et cetera,” Bachman says.

Until recently, Shavuot’s overlap with the end of the school year actually did confer some mazel at many Reform and Conservative synagogues, because Confirmation ceremonies—celebrations for high school students who have continued their Jewish education in addition to or instead of bar and bat mitzvahs—have traditionally been held on the holiday. But many congregations, including Bachman’s and Steinberg’s, have recently dropped Confirmation, which is increasingly seen an accommodation to Protestantism without authentic Jewish roots—another inadvertent blow to Shavuot.

Beyond the bad mazel, though, some conjecture that Shavuot may simply be too abstract to become popular among all but the most engaged or observant Jews. “The holidays that have done really well here are either firmly grounded in the home or allow for a kind of interplay between the synagogue and the home,” says Jenna Weissman Joselit, who teaches American Jewish history at George Washington University. Home-based holidays have strong elements of material and ritual—seders for Passover, sukkahs for Sukkot, menorahs for Hanukkah. But on Shavuot, “there’s no stuff and nothing to do, if you don’t go to shul,” Joselit says. “It’s a very serious holiday about law and responsibility and duty.” (All of this might be said as well for the High Holidays, which of course don’t lack for attendance. But the High Holidays make these themes personal, while Shavuot applies them to the Jews as a people—which, Joselit argues, makes them feel more remote.)

Shavuot is the consummate rabbis’ holiday: Its difficult themes of revelation, law, and collective responsibility make it a favorite among scholars—who struggle with how to share their enthusiasm with the laity. Elliot Dorff, a rabbi and professor of theology at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, calls it “my holiday”—precisely for the reasons their congregants may not. And Sarna says, “Shavuot is the holiday of books—it’s a harder sell, but we’re the People of the Book. Maybe it is our most authentic and distinctive holiday in that way.”

This idea might be starting to catch on: In the past few years, some synagogues have begun holding a tikkun leil Shavuot, or all-night study session, to celebrate the holiday. In its original form, the tikkun, first practiced in the 16th century by kabbalists who were themselves trying to revitalize Shavuot, involved prayer and Torah study from dusk until dawn; non-Orthodox congregations that hold the celebration now usually substitute lectures and roundtable discussions on a variety of subjects. Dorff said that Temple Beth Am, the Conservative synagogue he attends, can pull in 500 people for its tikkun (this year themed around “ethical, spiritual, halakhic implications of our food choices”), with 100 still remaining when the sun rises.

But some question whether the tikkun will ever catch on at most synagogues in a way that even approximates the success of lighter, more family-oriented holiday celebrations. “God bless Elliot Dorff, but Beth Am has a lot of academics and rabbis,” Steinberg said when asked whether he thought all-night study could save Shavuot. “That’s not the case for most synagogues. Most synagogues you get people till 10:00, then it dwindles.” (Indeed, some Jewish communities—in New York, California, and elsewhere—are trying to make the tikkun a more popular destination with performances, film screenings, and Israeli dancing.)

Steinberg’s own congregation is trying a different approach this year: bringing in a cow. Children at the synagogue will have an opportunity to watch a milking demonstration and churn their own butter in conjunction with the tradition of eating dairy on Shavuot. “We’ll see how it goes,” Steinberg says wryly. “It’s an intervention, if you will.”

Now, leaving aside Grant’s reputation as a corrupt, passive chief executive, Jews may think of his notorious General Order No. 11, which in 1862 expelled all Jews in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky on the grounds of halting the black-market cotton trade. (The order was quickly rescinded; Lincoln condemned it.)

But actually, notes J.J. Goldberg, Grant ought to be remembered as, yes, good for the Jews! Grant was probably only vaguely aware of the order. Beyond that:

• Grant made the first nomination of a Jew to the presidential cabinet, asking close friend Joseph Seligman, a Wall Streeter, to be his first Treasury Secretary; Seligman turned him down, but remained a close adviser, with access unprecedented for a Jew.

• In response to anti-Semitism in newly sovereign Romania, Grant appointed as U.S. consul Sephardic attorney Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, who had just finished a stint as national head of B’nai B’rith.

• Grant was the first U.S. president to attend services at a synagogue (Adas Israel in Washington, D.C.—which, I think I’m obligated to add, is my family’s congregation).

Now might be a good time to mention that historian Jonathan Sarna is writing a book all about Grant and General Order No. 11 … for Nextbook Press.

General Grant, The $50 Bill, and The Jewish Question [J.J. Goldberg]
Who’s Buried in the History Books? [NYT]

Earlier: Adolf Lincoln?

Equally wide-ranging and diverse are the Americans for whom Moses was a household name and a moral touchstone. In their darkest days, the Pilgrims sought comfort by reading about Moses’ tribulations, Feiler tells us, as did the founding fathers for whom the “reluctant leader of Israelite slaves end[s] up as the favorite son.” An affection for Moses also ran in families: Henry Ward Beecher and his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe were quite smitten with him. But then, so, too, were Cecil B. DeMille and Martin Luther King Jr. Feiler’s inventory of Moses’ fans and champions is so encompassing and expansive, you have to wonder whether there was anyone at all in America who did not cotton to the man.

Drawing on dozens of vignettes, the author goes further still, insisting that there’s hardly an American institution that has not been touched by Moses’ staff. Feiler is so taken with his subject, in fact, that he is moved to write in one of the book’s most eye-opening sentences that “Moses is our true founding father. His face belongs on Mount Rushmore.”

In his exuberant telling of Moses’ popularity and far-reaching impact on virtually every nook and cranny of American life, Feiler can’t help sounding a little like the author of The Da Vinci Code. He moves at breakneck speed and peppers his prose with lots of “aha”s. Cycling quickly through broad swaths of time and complex historical phenomena as if they were stops along the Tour de France, Feiler dispatches George Washington’s putative relationship with Moses, say, in a brisk couple of pages before moving on to something else entirely. His account accumulates encounters, quotes, and choice details, overwhelming the reader with a mountain of information.

And yet, there’s nary a footnote in sight. Instead, the book’s authority rests largely on Feiler himself. He puts his quest for Moses the American at the center of the narrative, seeking out thinkers like Peter Gomes, Jonathan Sarna, and Michael Walzer for tête-à-têtes about the biblical character’s impact on America; visiting museum curators; donning the costume that Charlton Heston wore when he played Moses in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments; and even meeting with George W. Bush in the White House for a chat about Moses’ impact on the presidency.

After making my way through America’s Prophet, I don’t doubt that America—then, as now—found the Israelite leader to be a most congenial fellow, bending him to its own political, rhetorical, and symbolic uses. But the Moses who inhabits these pages ends up being so protean and malleable a figure that it’s hard to figure out where he begins and America ends. Feiler’s unabashed celebration of his subject, whom he likens at one point to a “kind of American Hamlet,” leaves little room for nuance, equivocation, and the sifting of sources. The hundreds of references to and perspectives on the man that animate the book end up sounding the same note: three cheers for Moses. The net effect is to flatten rather than clarify his appeal.

In the end, Feiler is so busy trumpeting America’s affinity for the biblical figure that you are left to wonder what the affinity actually proves. What does it say about this great big republic of ours that so many of its leaders made use of Moses and the Exodus story for their own ends—as a call to arms, a rallying point, a cautionary tale? Why did the United States clasp Moses to its bosom when so many other God-fearing nations did not? Where are we to draw the line between religion and politics or, for that matter, between religion and the public square? By the time we put down America’s Prophet, we’re none the wiser. But we sure can cite chapter and verse.

Jenna Weissman Joselit is a professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University. She is currently at work on a book about America’s relationship to the Ten Commandments.